Perestroika Timeline, 2009/2013

Chto Delat?/What is to be done?

18 March 2013

This installation by the collective of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers Chto Delat? (a name that echoes the famous writings of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) reflects through videos and in-situ wall-drawings upon the notions of social emancipation and collectivism. Referring to perestroika, the process of “restructuring” of the Soviet political and economic system, the work offers a timeline as it were of what has happened between 1986 (introduction of perestroika and glasnost by then head of state in the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev) and 1992 (disintegration of the Soviet Union), including the statements on the massive impoverishment of the population and extreme forms of nationalism and religious obscurantism leading to civil wars and terrorism. This summary is followed by a hypothetical, analogous chronology titled “What Might Have Happened.” This “what if” list involves imaginaries such as: “The Soviet Union is transformed into a federative state based on broad autonomy of republics, districts, and cities,” and “Workers take full control of all factories and enterprises,” or “Governments fully disarm and unite to create a fund to ensure the future of the planet.” But also: “The West undergoes its own version of perestroika. Inspired by the processes underway in a renewed Soviet Union, western societies carry out a series of radical social-democratic reforms,” a parallel to the proposition of “former West” in regards to the need to rethink the place of the so-called West outside of its self-claimed hegemony in the world.